I think trying to learn programming with someone else is great but of course you also need some books to get you started and do your homework with. Read a few chapeters of something like "Programming Perl" or something that is geared more towards what you actually want to do, e.g. in my case it was bioinformatics, for which "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" is the best way to start.
For social coding (best way to learn from and with others), find or start a little project on github. There's nothing like seeing other people's code to learn how things are done, somthing that a book will never be able to teach you. A small Perl module, maybe one for a simple system admin task or something that collects some stuff off of web pages is always a good start. In my experiencce, the idea for a project should come first because that gives you the motivation to learn the techniques you will need to make it work.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other